Regardless of the policy approach – from protection to assimilation, self-determination to intervention, reconciliation to recognition – settler colonial governments have continued to do harm to Indigenous peoples. Despite this, many scholars, activists, and analysts – Indigenous and settler alike – maintain a degree of faith in the liberal settler order, or at least a belief that working with the state is the only viable political option.

The fourth lecture in the series will consider why apparently progressive settler Australia persists in the face of such obvious failure.

Professor Sarah Maddison will argue that white Australia can’t solve black problems because white Australia is the problem, and calls for a radical restructuring of the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the Australian settler state.

Presenter

Professor Sarah Maddison

Professor of Politics The University of Melbourne

Sarah Maddison is Professor of Politics in the School of Social and Political Sciences, coDirector of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration, and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts, at The University of Melbourne.
Sarah is the author or editor of nine books including most recently The Colonial Fantasy: Why white Australia can’t solve black problems. She has also published The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation (2016), Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation (2015), Beyond White Guilt (2011), Unsettling the Settler State (2011), and Black Politics (2009).